We Are The Knight: Legends Of Eisenwald

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At its best, King’s Bounty took Heroes of Might and Magic on in its own castle courtyard, stormed the battlements, kicked the po-faced paste out of the venerable old king who sat there wheezing through his life, and then married a zombie and rode off on a spider-steed with the vocal inflections of a country gentleman. Overworld exploration and basic strategic army building, turn-based combat, levelling and loot – it had all those things, but at its best it also had all the bonkers stuff. Legends of Eisenwald aims to be a similar game but takes its theme and atmosphere from a different place, dropping the fantasy cliches of smug elf and bearded dwarf, and aiming instead for a truly gothic late medieval experience.

There’s recently been a Kickstarter project for the game and it has reached its initial funding target, although there are further incentives if money continues to be digitally delivered over the next three days. It’s also one of those projects that was already a good way into development when it joined Kickstarter, the platform being used to spread awareness, finish more quickly and efficiently, and presumably to buy food and pay rent. This means anyone pledging $25 or more should have access to the closed beta by June rather than waiting years to get their grubby paws on anything playable.

The pitch video follows the development team dressed up like a gang of LARPers in what could be excruciating fashion, but it’s actually one of the best I’ve seen. It’s informative, contains plenty of footage of the actual game and everyone involved seems to be just about uncomfortable enough for me to believe they were forced into this by their CEO, who has an actual sword and therefore must be respected. If you were to pledge $9,555 you’d have a sword as well because Aterdux Entertainment will send you one.

Enough about the rewards and the pitch though, what about the game. There’s a combat video from the alpha but if there’s anything more boring to the eye than a HOMM type battle being played out slowly and with commentary I don’t know what it is. I’ll put it here anyway but please don’t watch the first 30 seconds and throw your monitor out of the window. Read about the combat here instead, that’s more helpful.

The important thing about the combat is that every unit will have something to do on every turn, rather than simply trotting around a tiny grid. If you’re engaged with enemies, you fight them until one of you is incapacitated, if you’re not, then you choose who to engage with. Ranged units seem to be handled like artillery, based in a fixed location and firing from there, requiring protection.

These kind of tactical grids have always had a high degree of abstraction, whether it’s in the representation of hundreds of units as a single figure taking up a single space, or the non-existent overview of a hero or commander. Eisenwald seems to embrace that abstract nature and utilise it for a very specific sort of tactical conflict. I like.

I also like these words on the world map, the strategy side of each scenario. Look at these upgrade branches and tell me they’re not far more more pleasing than a tiny goblin turning into a meaty orc that then inexplicably levels up into a dragon.

I backed this having first found about it in the forum thread that Spider Jerusalem started. I wasn’t going to throw money at another Kickstarter this month, already backed Wasteland 2, Starlight Inception and Grim Dawn in the last few weeks, but I really like the look of this and of all of those, this is the one I’m most looking forward to playing. And it may actually arrive before the end of this year which is nice.

Yeah some of the best things about this is we get their previous game in a few weeks as a reward for backing them, then within another month or so we get to start beta testing! (if you go for $25 or greater) That means we’ll be playing this much earlier than Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2 or any of the others! :-D

Also, they’re based in Belarus, where I suspect USD go a fair bit further than they do in some other parts of the world.

Edit: For reference, their current total of just shy of $65,000 USD is 529,799,510 Belarusian rubles. Yes, that’s almost 530 million rubles. Probably not as impressive in terms of purchasing power as it might look, but still.

I was just looking at this kickstarter a second ago. The problem I have is that it just looks very bland- lacking any of the personality of say King’s Bounty. I wish someone would take the concept and put it in a completely different setting.

That said, I’ll keep an eye on it and probably add my tuppence it if it reaches the Mac stretch goal.

As an aside, I think people coming in the comments thread and doing some extreme plugging for other kickstarter projects is really not a good idea. From an backer’s perspective it can actually be a good thing if a project doesn’t get funded because not enough people are interested in it.

It’s already planned on Mac and Linux, the stretch goal is only for simultaneous release with Windows.

As for the art style, it’s true King’s Bounty use a style appealing to more people, but growing a bit tired of that art style being overused in games I’m looking forward to something less generic. That, and there’s enough elves/hobbits already, so the direction they’re going towards is a nice change for the HOMM genre.

A developer describing the Codex as “extremely friendly” doesn’t come along very often. Anyway, their interview over there is interesting, and Aterdux are faring well in the forum thread (link: link to rpgcodex.net). Overall, Legends of Eisenwald seems to be a solid product made by some genuinely nice guys.

This is on my select group of backed Kickstarter projects. I thought the style of combat/upgrades etc would make for some compulsive play and the setting/art.music all look rather excellent. Glad this one made its target.

It’s also not a type of game I’ve actuall played particularly often, which has me wondering if I should have a shot of some King’s Bounty too.

There are demos of KB: The Legend and its sequel Armoured Princess (along with its xpac Crossworlds) around so give those a shot. I have both and would recommend starting with The Legend, since it has a slightly nicer start, whereas Armoured Princess/Crossworlds is a fair bit harder. They are both hard though, hard enough for me to succumb to giving myself a hand with console codes once or twice.

On a tangentially related note, what ever happened to the RTS? Relic and TCA seem to be the only ones making them anymore. There seem to be surprising quantity of turn-based and grand strategy games coming out these days, but it’s a shame to see so little innovation with real-time stuff.

There’s also been Ruse and Wargame, Achron, Sword of the Stars II (for the same definition of RTS as the Total War games, anyway), several Men of War titles, Hegemony, Naval War: Arctic Circle, Age of Empires Online, a few Paradox grand strategy games (again, for a loose definition of RTS), King Arthur, King Arthur II, The King’s Crusade, a couple of Real Warfare titles, and various other things. Not much in a AAA vein, I grant you, but RTS is a genre that historically has only worked on PC and AAA development is increasingly insistent on at minimum a multiplatform release. If you’re asking about Kickstarters, well… I dunno. The RTS genre’s hardly been as neglected as turn-based strategy (/ RPGs with turn-based combat), adventure games, etc, and is also probably more expensive to meet expectations.

Can’t watch the video, but my main issue with combat in King’s Bounty was it just got so grindy.

I really wish engaging obviously weaker forces, or starting to win a battle in a highly convincing way, just caused all the enemy troops to rout off the field (and not come back!). It’d make the grindy battles a lot shorter, without affecting the important close ones. It’d also reward good tactics at the start.

That and not keeping all the tactical options locked away in a upgrade tree. (positioning your own units needs to be unlocked??? )

I have to say that “Look at these upgrade branches and tell me they’re not far more more pleasing than a tiny goblin turning into a meaty orc that then inexplicably levels up into a dragon” is just wrong.